What specific property in Palm Beach was involved in the Trump-Epstein deal?

1. The house named: Maison de l’Amitié, the Gosman estate on North County Road

Contemporary reporting and property histories identify the oceanfront mansion as Maison de l’Amitié — the French‑Regency style manse that had been owned by nursing‑home magnate Abe Gosman and that sat on a roughly six‑acre parcel on North County Road in Palm Beach; the name and identification appear in multiple local and national accounts ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

2. How the property changed hands: the 2004 bankruptcy auction and the winning bid

In November 2004 the Gosman estate was sold in a bankruptcy auction in West Palm Beach in which Donald Trump submitted the highest bid of $41.35 million, outbidding several rivals that reporting says included Jeffrey Epstein and other local bidders ^{[2] [3] [6]}. Multiple outlets repeat the $41.35 million purchase price and describe the sale as a public, courtroom auction of a troubled asset tied to Gosman ^{[2] [3]}.

3. Why the sale matters to the Trump–Epstein narrative

Journalists and subsequent commentators have pointed to the auction as the tangible event that precipitated or symbolized the rupture between the two men: after years of socializing in Palm Beach and New York, the bidding war over Maison de l’Amitié is widely cited as the business dispute that ended their friendship ^{[4] [7]}. The Post, PBS and local Palm Beach outlets recount the auction as the episode Trump and others have used to mark the end of their association ^{[8] [4] [3]}.

4. Competing accounts, numbers and possible agendas

Not all versions of the story line up: some commentators, notably biographer Michael Wolff and secondary outlets retelling his claims, assert different figures (a $36 million or roughly $40 million negotiation) and add an account that Trump “went behind” Epstein’s back to buy the house, a narrative that Wolff says came from interviews and tapes ^{[5] [9] [10]}. Those versions feed an interpretation that personal betrayal — not alleged improprieties at Mar‑a‑Lago — motivated the split, a framing that suits different political and media agendas by emphasizing greed and rivalry over moral culpability; mainstream local reporting, by contrast, relies on auction records and repeats the $41.35 million courtroom bid as the dispositive fact ^{[2] [3]}.

5. Distinguishing the auctioned estate from Epstein’s separate Palm Beach home

Reporting also distinguishes the auctioned Maison de l’Amitié from Epstein’s own Palm Beach residence on El Brillo Way, which figured in separate criminal investigations and has a different history; articles note Epstein’s El Brillo Way house was the site of earlier local complaints and later demolition, separate from the Gosman property sold at auction ^[3]. That separation matters because some retellings conflate the properties, obscuring which house is at the center of the 2004 bidding dispute ^{[7] [3]}.

6. What is firmly established and what remains unresolved

What is firmly documented in contemporary reporting is that the North County Road/Gosman mansion commonly called Maison de l’Amitié was sold at a 2004 bankruptcy auction won by Trump for $41.35 million and that Epstein participated in the bidding — facts reported by Palm Beach news outlets and repeated in national coverage ^{[2] [3] [1]}. What remains unsettled in the public record are the private motivations, the precise sequence of conversations between the men, and some later alternate price claims and interpretations drawn from memoirs and secondary accounts rather than contemporaneous court documents ^{[5] [9]}. Contemporary sources used here provide the property’s name, location and auction outcome but cannot on their own resolve the motives behind the split or whether other private actors influenced the sale beyond the public bidding record ^{[2] [3] [4]}.